Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes (Excerpt)

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PAST IMPERFECT

Julian Fellowes

St. Martin’s Press

New York

Past Imperfect:Layout 1

7/7/09

11:09 AM

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is is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

PAST IMPERFECT. Copyright © 2008 by Julian Fellowes. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fellowes, Julian.

Past imperfect / Julian Fellowes. — 1st U.S. ed. p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-312-57068-2 1. Upper class—England—London—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. 3. Nineteen sixties—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6106.E4P37 2009 823'.92—dc22 2009016254 First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of e Orion Group Ltd First U.S. Edition: September 2009 10 9

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ONE

London is a haunted city for me now and I am the ghost that haunts it. As I go about my business, every street or square or avenue seems to whisper of an earlier, different era in my history. The shortest trip round Chelsea or Kensington takes me by some door where once I was welcome but where today I am a stranger. I see myself issue forth, young again and dressed for some long forgotten frolic, tricked out in what looks like the national dress of a war-torn Balkan country. Those flapping flares, those frilly shirts with their footballers’ collars – what were we thinking of? And as I watch, beside that wraith of a younger, slimmer me walk the shades of the departed, parents, aunts and grandmothers, great-uncles and cousins, friends and girlfriends, gone now from this world entirely, or at least from what is left of my own life.

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

Which makes it perfectly understandable that I should have been just a little intrigued, if taken aback, to find a letter from Damian Baxter lying among the bills and thank yous and requests for charitable assistance that pile up daily on my desk. I certainly could not have predicted it. We hadn’t seen each other in almost forty years, nor had we communicated since our last meeting. It seems odd, I know, but we had spent our lives in different worlds and although England is a small country in many ways, it is still big enough for our paths never to have crossed in all that time. But there was another reason for my surprise and it was simpler.

I hated him. 

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A glance was enough to tell me whom it was from, though. The writing on the envelope was familiar but changed, like the face of a favourite child after the years have done their unforgiving work. Even so, before that morning, if I’d thought of him at all, I would not have believed there was anything on earth that would have induced Damian to write to me. Or I to him. I hasten to add that I wasn’t offended by this unexpected delivery. Not in the least. It is always pleasant to hear from an old friend but at my age it is, if anything, more interesting to hear from an old enemy. An enemy, unlike a friend, can tell you things you do not already know of your own past. And if Damian wasn’t exactly an enemy in any active sense, he was a former friend, which is of course much worse. We had parted with a quarrel, a moment of savage, unchecked rage, quite deliberately powered by the heat of burning bridges, and we had gone our separate ways, making no subsequent attempt to undo the damage.

It was an honest letter, that I will say. The English, as a rule, would rather not face a situation that might be rendered ‘awkward’ by the memory of earlier behaviour. Usually they will play down any disagreeable past episodes with a vague and dismissive reference: ‘Do you remember that frightful dinner Jocelyn gave? How did we all survive it?’ Or, if the episode really cannot be reduced and detoxified in this way, they pretend it never took place. ‘It’s been far too long since we met,’ as an opener will often translate as ‘it does not suit me to continue this feud any longer. It was ages ago. Are you prepared to call it a day?’

If the recipient is willing, the answer will be couched in similar denial mode: ‘Yes, let’s meet. What have you been up to since you left Lazard’s?’

Nothing more than this will be required to signify that the nastiness is finished and normal relations may now be resumed.

But in this case Damian eschewed the common practice. Indeed, his honesty was positively Latin. ‘I dare say, after everything that happened, you did not expect to hear from me again but I would take it as a great favour if you would pay me a visit,’ he wrote in his spiky, and still rather angry, hand. ‘I can’t think why you should, after the last time we were together, but at the risk of self-dramatising, I have not long to live and it may mean something to do a favour for a dying man.’ At least I could not accuse him of evasion. For a while I pretended to myself that I was thinking it over, trying to decide, but of course I 

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knew at once that I would go, that my curiosity must be assuaged, that I would deliberately revisit the lost land of my youth. For, having had no contact with Damian since the summer of , his return to my conscious mind inevitably brought sharp reminders of how much my world, like everyone else’s world for that matter, has changed.

There’s danger in it, obviously, but I no longer fight the sad realisation that the setting for my growing years seems sweeter to me than the one I now inhabit. Today’s young, in righteous, understandable defence of their own time, generally reject our reminiscences about a golden age when the customer was always right, when AA men saluted the badge on your car and policemen touched their helmet in greeting. Thank heaven for the end of deference, they say, but deference is part of an ordered, certain world and, in retrospect at least, that can feel warming and even kind. I suppose what I miss above all things is the kindness of the England of half a century ago. But then again, is it the kindness I regret, or my own youth?

‘I don’t understand who this Damian Baxter is exactly? Why is he so significant?’ said Bridget as, later that evening, we sat at home eating some rather overpriced and undercooked fish, purchased from my compliant, local Italian on the Old Brompton Road. ‘I’ve never heard you talk about him.’ At the time when Damian sent his letter, not all that long ago in fact, I was still living in a large, ground-floor flat in Wetherby Gardens, which was comfortable, convenient for this and that, and wonderfully placed for the takeaway culture that has overwhelmed us in the last few years. It was quite a smart address in its way and I certainly could never have afforded to buy it, but it had been relinquished to me by my parents years before, when they had finally abandoned London. My father tried to object, but my mother had rashly insisted that I needed ‘somewhere to start,’ and he’d surrendered.

So I profited from their generosity and fully expected not only to start, but also to finish, there. In truth, I hadn’t changed it much since my mother’s day and it was still filled with her things. We were sitting at her small, round breakfast table in the window as we spoke, and I suppose the whole apartment could have seemed quite feminine, with its charming pieces of Regency furniture and a boy ancestor in curls over the chimneypiece, were my masculinity not reasserted by my obvious and total lack of interest in its arrangements. 

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At the time of the letter incident, Bridget FitzGerald was my current . . . I was going to say ‘girlfriend’ but I am not sure one has ‘girlfriends’ when one is over fifty. On the other hand, if one is too old for a ‘girlfriend,’ one is too young for a ‘companion,’ so what is the correct description? Modern parlance has stolen so many words and put them to misuse that frequently, when one looks for a suitable term, the cupboard is bare. ‘Partner,’ as everyone not in the media knows, is both tired and fraught with danger. I recently introduced a fellow director in a small company I own as my partner and it was some time before I understood the looks I was getting from various people there who thought they knew me. But ‘other half’ sounds like a line from a situation comedy about a golf club secretary, and we haven’t quite got to the point of ‘This is my mistress,’ although I dare say it’s not far off.

Anyway, Bridget and I were going about together. We were a slightly unlikely pair. I, a not-very-celebrated novelist, she, a sharp Irish businesswoman specialising in property, who had missed the boat romantically and ended up with me.

My mother would not have approved, but my mother was dead and so, in theory, out of the equation, although I am not convinced we are ever beyond the influence of our parents’ disapproval, be they dead or alive. Of course, there was a chance she might have been mellowed by the afterlife, but I rather doubt it. Maybe I should have listened to her posthumous promptings, since I can’t pretend that Bridget and I had much in common. That said, she was clever and good-looking, which was more than I deserved, and I was lonely, I suppose, and tired of people ringing to see if I wanted to come over for Sunday lunch.

Anyway, whatever the reason, we had found each other and, while we did not technically live together, since she kept on her own flat, we’d jogged along for a couple of years quite peaceably. It wasn’t exactly love, but it was something.

What amused me with reference to Damian’s letter was Bridget’s proprietorial tone when referring to a past of which, almost by definition, she could know little or nothing. The phrase ‘I’ve never heard you talk about him,’ can only mean that, were this fellow significant, you would have talked about him. Or, worse, you should have talked about him. This is all part of the popular fantasy that when you are involved with someone it is your right to know all about them, down 

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to the last detail, which of course can never be. ‘We have no secrets,’ say cheerful, young faces in films, when, as we all know, our whole lives are filled with secrets, frequently kept from ourselves. Clearly, in this instance Bridget was troubled that if Damian were important to me and yet I had never mentioned him, how much else of significance had been kept concealed? In my defence I can only say that her past, too, like mine, like everyone’s in fact, was a locked box. Occasionally we allow people a peep, but generally only at the top level. The darker streams of our memories we negotiate alone.

‘He was a friend of mine at Cambridge,’ I said. ‘We met in my second year, around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while.’

‘Being debs’ delights.’ She spoke the phrase with a mixture of comedy and derision.

‘I am glad my early life never fails to bring a smile to your lips.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Nothing happened. We drifted apart after we left, but there’s no story. We just went in different directions.’ In saying this I was, of course, lying.

She looked at me, hearing a little more than I had intended. ‘If you do go, I assume you’ll want to go alone.’

‘Yes. I’ll go alone.’ I offered no further explanation but, to be fair to her, she didn’t ask for one.

I used to think that Damian Baxter was my invention, although such a notion only demonstrates my own inexperience. As anyone knows, the most brilliant magician in the world cannot produce a rabbit out of a hat unless there is already a rabbit in the hat, albeit well concealed, and Damian would never have enjoyed the success that I took credit for unless he had been genuinely possessed of those qualities that made his triumph possible and even inevitable. Nevertheless, I do not believe he would have made it into the social limelight as a young man, in those days anyway, without some help. And I was the one who gave it. It was perhaps for this reason that I resented his betrayal quite so bitterly. I put a good face on it, or I tried to, but it still stung. Trilby had turned traitor to Svengali, Galatea had destroyed Pygmalion’s dreams. 

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‘Any time on any day will be convenient,’ the letter said. ‘I do not go out now or entertain, so I am completely at your disposal. You will find me quite near Guildford. If you drive, it may take ninety minutes but the train is quicker. Let me know and I will either arrange directions or someone can meet you, whichever you prefer.’ In the end, after my fake prevarication, I wrote back suggesting dinner on such and such a day, and named the train I would catch. He confirmed this with an invitation for the night. As a rule I prefer, like Jorrocks, to ‘sleeps where I dines,’ so I accepted and the plan was settled. Accordingly, I passed through the barrier at Guildford station on a pleasant summer evening in June.

I looked about vaguely for some Eastern European holding a card with my name mis-spelled in felt tip pen but instead of this, I found myself approached by a uniformed chauffeur – or rather someone who looked like an actor playing a chauffeur in an episode of Hercule Poirot – who replaced his peaked cap after introducing himself in low and humble tones, and led the way outside to a new Bentley, parked illegally in the space reserved for the disabled. I say ‘illegally,’ even though there was a badge clearly displayed in the window, because I assume these are not distributed so that friends may be met off trains without their getting wet or having to walk too far with their luggage. But then again, everyone deserves the odd perk.

I did know that Damian had done well, though how or why I knew I cannot now remember, for we shared no pals and moved in completely different circles. I must have seen his name on a Sunday Times list or maybe in an article on a financial page. But I don’t think, before that evening, I understood quite how well he had done. We sped through the Surrey lanes and it was soon clear, from the trimmed hedging and the pointed walls, from the lawns like billiard tables and the glistening, weeded gravel, that we had entered the Kingdom of the Rich. Here there were no crumbling gate piers, no empty stables and lodges with leaking roofs. This was not a question of tradition and former glory. I was witnessing not the memory but the living presence of money.

I do have some experience of it. As a moderately successful writer, one rubs up against what Nanny would call ‘all sorts,’ but I can’t pretend this was ever really my crowd. Most of the so-called rich I know are possessed of surviving, not newborn, fortunes, the rich who 

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used to be a good deal richer. But the houses I was passing belonged to the Now Rich, which is different, and for me there is something invigorating in their sense of immediate power. It is peculiar, but even today there is a snobbery in Britain when it comes to new money. The traditional Right might be expected to turn up their noses at it I suppose, but paradoxically, it is often the intellectual Left who advertise their disapproval of the self-made. I do not pretend to understand how this is compatible with a belief in equality of opportunity. Perhaps they do not try to synthesise them, but just live by contradictory impulses, which I suppose we all do to some degree. But if I may have been guilty of such unimaginative thinking in my youth, it is gone from me now.

These days I unashamedly admire men and women who have made their pile, just as I admire anyone who looks at the future mapped out for them at birth and is not afraid to tear it up and draw a better one.

The self-made have more chance than most of finding a life that truly suits. I salute them for it and I salute their bejewelled world. Of course, on a personal level it was extremely annoying that Damian Baxter should be a part of it.

The house he had chosen as a setting for his splendour was not a fallen nobleman’s palace but rather one of those self-consciously moral, Arts and Crafts, rambling warrens that seem to belong in a Disney cartoon and are no more convincing as a symbol of Olde England than they were when Lutyens built them at the turn of the last century.

Surrounding it were gardens, terraced, clipped and criss-crossed with trim and tended paths, but seemingly no land beyond that. Damian had not apparently decided to adopt the ancient model of imitation gentry. This was not a manor house, nestling in the warm embrace of farming acres. This was simply the home of a Great Success.

Having said that, while not traditional in an aristocratic sense, the whole thing had quite a s feel, as if it were built with the ill-gotten gains of a First World War profiteer. The Agatha Christie element provided by the chauffeur was continued by the bowing butler at the door and even by a housemaid, glimpsed on my way to the pale oak staircase, in her black dress and frilly apron, although she seemed perhaps more frivolous, as if I had suddenly been transported to the set of a Gershwin musical. A sense of the odd unreality of the adventure was, if anything, confirmed when I was shown to my room without 

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first having met my host. There is always a slight whodunnit shiver of danger in this arrangement. A dark-clad servant hovering in the door and muttering ‘Please come down to the drawing room when you are ready, Sir,’ seems more suited to the reading of a will than a social call.

But the room itself was nice enough. It was lined with pale-blue damask, which had also been used to drape the high, four-poster bed.

The furniture was stable, solid English stuff and a group of Chinoiserie paintings on glass, between the windows, was really charming, even if there was the unmistakable tinge of a country house hotel, rather than a real country house, about it all, confirmed by the bathroom, which was sensational, with a huge bath, a walk-in shower, shiny taps on tall pipes coming straight up out of the floor, and enormous towels, fluffy and brand new. As we know, this kind of detail is seldom found in private houses in the shires, even today. I tidied myself up and went downstairs.

The drawing room was predictably cavernous, with a vaulted ceiling and those over-springy carpets that have been too recently replaced.

Not the shagpile of the minted club owner, nor the flat and ancient rugs of the posh, but smooth and sprung and new. Everything in the room had been purchased within living memory and apparently by a single purchaser. There was none of the ragbag of tastes that country houses are inclined to represent, where the contents of a dozen homes, the amalgamated product of forty amateur collectors over two or three centuries, are flung together into a single room. But it was good. In fact, it was excellent, the furniture largely from the early years of the eighteenth century, the pictures rather later, all fine, all shining clean and all in tip-top condition. After the similar experience of my bedroom, I wondered if Damian had employed a buyer, someone whose job was just to put his life together. Either way, there was no very tangible sense of him, or any other personality really, in the room.

I wandered about, glancing at the paintings, unsure whether to stand or sit. In truth it felt forlorn, despite its splendour; the burning coals in the grate could not dispel the slightly clammy atmosphere, as if the room had been cleaned but not used for quite a while. And there were no flowers, which I always think a telltale sign; there was nothing living, in fact, giving a staleness to its perfection, a kind of lifeless sterility. I could not imagine that a woman had played much part in its creation, 

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nor, God knows, that a child had played any part at all.

There was a sound at the door. ‘My dear chap,’ said a voice, still with the slight hesitance, the suspicion of a stammer, that I remembered so well. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.’

There is a moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet catches sight of her sister who has returned with the dastardly Wickham, rescued from disgrace by the efforts of Mr Darcy. ‘Lydia was Lydia still,’ she comments. Well, Damian Baxter was Damian still. That is, while the broad and handsome young man with the thick curls and the easy smile had vanished and been replaced by a hunched figure resembling no one so much as Doctor Manette, I could detect that distinctive, diffident stutter masking a deep and honed sense of superiority, and I recognised at once the old, patronising arrogance in the flourish with which he held out his bony hand. I smiled. ‘How very nice to see you,’ I said.

‘Is it?’ We stared at each other’s faces, marvelling simultaneously at the extent, and at the lack, of change that we found there.

As I looked at him more closely I could see that when he had talked in his letter of being ‘a dying man,’ he had been speaking the literal truth. He was not just old before his time but ill, very ill, and seemingly past the point of no return. ‘Well, it’s interesting. I suppose I can say that.’

‘Yes, you can say that.’ He nodded to the butler who hovered near the door. ‘I wonder if we might have some of that champagne?’ It didn’t surprise me that even forty years later he still liked to wrap his orders in diffident questions. I was a veteran witness of this trick. Like many who try it, Damian imagined, I think, that it suggested a charming lack of confidence, a faltering but honourable desire to get it right, which I knew for a fact he had not felt since some time around  and I doubt he knew much of it then. The man addressed did not seem to feel any answer was required of him and I’m sure it wasn’t. He just went to get the wine.

Dinner was a formal, muted affair in a dining room that unsuccessfully crossed William Morris and Liberty’s with a dash of the Hollywood hills. High, mullioned windows, a heavy, carved, stone chimneypiece and more of the bouncy carpet added up to a curiously flat and unevocative result, as if a table and chairs had unaccountably 

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been set up in an empty, but expensive, lawyer’s office. But the food was delicious, if quite wasted on Damian, and we both got some fun out of the Margaux he’d selected. The silent butler, whom I now knew as Bassett, hardly left us for a minute and, inevitably, the conversation played out before him was desultory. I remember an aunt once telling me that when she looked back to the days before the war, she was astonished at some of the table talk she’d witnessed, where the presence of servants seemed to act as no restraining force at all. Political secrets, family gossip, personal indiscretions, all came bubbling forth before the listening footmen and must presumably have enlivened many an evening in the local pub, if not, as in our more greedy and salacious times, their published memoirs. But we have lost that generation’s sublime confidence in their own way of life. Whether we like it or not – and I do like it really – time has made us conscious of the human spirit in those who serve us. For anyone born since the s all walls have ears.

So we nattered on about this and that. He asked after my parents and I asked after his. In actual fact my father had been quite fond of him but my mother, whose jungle instincts were generally more reliable, sensed trouble from the start. She, at any rate, had died in the interim since we last met and so had both of his, so there wasn’t much to be said.

From there, we discussed various others of that mutual acquaintance of long ago, and by the time we were ready to move on we had covered an impressive list of career disappointments, divorces and premature death.

At last he stood, addressing Bassett as he did so. ‘Do you think we could have our coffee in the library?’ Again he asked softly, as a favour that might be denied. What would happen, I wonder, if someone so instructed should take the hesitant question at face value? ‘No, Sir. I’m afraid I’m a bit busy at the moment. I’ll try to bring some coffee later on.’ I should like to see it once. But this butler knew what he was about and went to carry out the veiled command, while Damian led the way into the nicest of the rooms that I had seen. It looked as if an earlier owner, or possibly Damian himself, had purchased a complete library from a much older house, with dark, richly shining shelves and a screen of beautifully carved columns. There was a delicate chimneypiece of pinkish marble and in a polished steel basket a fire had been lit for our 

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arrival. The combination of flickering flames and gleaming leather bindings, as well as some excellent pictures – a large seascape that looked like a Turner and the portrait of a young girl by Lawrence among them – gave a warmth notably lacking elsewhere in the house.

I had been unjust. Obviously it was not lack of taste but lack of interest that had made the other rooms so dreary. This was where Damian actually lived. Before long we were equipped with drinks and cups of coffee, and alone.

‘You’ve done very well,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Are you surprised?’

‘Not terribly.’

He accepted this with a nod. ‘If you mean I was always ambitious, I confess it.’

‘I think I meant that you would never take no for an answer.’

He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he said. I wasn’t completely sure what he meant by this but before I could delve he spoke again. ‘I knew when I was beaten, even then. When I found myself in a situation where success was not a possible outcome, I accepted it and moved on.

You must grant me that.’

This was nonsense. ‘I won’t grant you that,’ I said. ‘Or anything like it. It may be a virtue you achieved in later life. I cannot tell. But when I knew you your eyes were much larger than your stomach and you were a very poor loser, as I should know.’

Damian looked surprised for a moment. Perhaps he had spent so much of his life with people who were paid, in one way or another, to agree with him that he had forgotten not everyone was obliged to. He sipped his brandy and after a pause he nodded. ‘Well, be that as it may, I am beaten now.’ In answer to my unasked question he elaborated. ‘I have inoperable cancer of the pancreas. There is nothing to be done.

The doctor has given me about three months to live.’

‘They often get these things wrong.’

‘They occasionally get these things wrong. But not in my case. There may be a variant of a few weeks, but that’s all.’

‘Oh.’ I nodded. It is hard to know how to respond suitably to this kind of declaration because people’s needs can be so different. I doubted that Damian would want wailing and weeping or suggestions of alternative cures based on a macrobiotic diet, but you never know. I waited. 

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‘I don’t want you to feel I am raging at the injustice of it. My life has, in a way, come to a natural conclusion.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I have, as you point out, been very fortunate. I’ve lived well. I’ve travelled. And there’s nothing left in my work that I still want to do, so that’s something. Do you know what I’ve been up to?’

‘Not really.’

‘I built up a company in computer software. We were among the first to see the potential of the whole thing.’

‘How clever of you.’

‘You’re right. It does sound dull, but I enjoyed it. Anyway, I’ve sold the business and I will not start another.’

‘You don’t know that.’ I can’t think why I said this, because of course he did know exactly that.

‘I’m not complaining. I sold out to a nice, big American company and they gave me enough money to put Malawi back on its feet.’

‘But that’s not what you’re going to do with it.’

‘I don’t think so, no.’

He hesitated. I was fairly sure we were approaching what they call the ‘nub’ of why I was here, but he didn’t seem able to progress things.

I thought I might as well have a shot at moving us along. ‘What about your private life?’ I ventured pleasantly.

He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t really have one. Nothing worthy of the name. The odd arrangement for my comfort, but nothing more than that for many years now. I’m not at all social.’

‘You were when I knew you,’ I said. I was still transfixed by the thought of the ‘odd arrangement for my comfort.’ Golly. I resolved to steer clear of any attempt at clarification.

There was no further need to keep things moving. Damian had got started. ‘I did not like the world you took me into, as you know.’ He looked at me challengingly but I had no comment to make so he continued, ‘but, paradoxically, when I left it, I found I didn’t care for the entertainments of my old world either. After a while I gave up “parties” altogether.’

‘Did you marry?’

‘Once. It didn’t last very long.’

‘I’m sorry.’ 

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‘Don’t be. I only married because I’d got to that age when it starts to feel odd not to have married. I was thirty-six or -seven and curious eyebrows were beginning to be raised. Of course, I was a fool. If I’d waited another five years, my friends would have started to divorce and I wouldn’t have been the only freak in the circus.’

Was she anyone I knew?’

‘Oh, no. I’d escaped from your crowd by then and I had no desire to return to it, I can assure you.’

‘Any more than we had the smallest desire to see you,’ I said. There was something relieving in this. A trace of our mutual dislike had surfaced and it felt more comfortable than the pseudo-friendship we had been playing at all evening. ‘Besides, you don’t know what my crowd is. You don’t know anything about my life. It changed that night as much as yours. And there is more than one way of moving on from a London Season of forty years ago.’

He accepted this without querying it. ‘Quite right. I apologise. But, truly, you would not have known Suzanne. When I met her she was running a fitness centre near Leatherhead.’ Inwardly I agreed that it was unlikely my path had crossed with the ex-Mrs Baxter’s so I was silent. He sighed wearily. ‘She tried her best. I don’t want to speak ill of her. But we had nothing at all to hold us together.’ He paused. ‘You never married in the end, did you?’

‘No. I didn’t. Not in the end.’ The words came out more harshly than I intended but he did not seem to wonder at it. The subject was painful for me and uncomfortable for him. At least, it bloody well should have been. I decided to return to a safer place. ‘What happened to your wife?’

‘Oh, she married again. Rather a nice chap. He has a business selling sportsware, so I suppose they had more to build on than we did.’

‘Were there any children?’

‘Two boys and a girl. Though I don’t know what happened to them.’

‘I meant with you.’

He shook his head. ‘No, there weren’t.’ This time his silence seemed very profound. After a moment he completed the thought. ‘I can’t have children,’ he said. Despite the apparent finality of this statement there was something oddly unfinal in the tone of his voice, almost like that strange and unnecessary question mark that the young have imported 

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from Australia, to finish every sentence. He continued, ‘that is to say, I could not have children by the time that I married.’

He stopped, as if to allow me a moment to digest this peculiar sentence. What could he possibly mean? I assumed he had not been castrated shortly before proposing to the fitness centre manageress.

Since he had introduced the topic, I didn’t feel guilty in wanting to make a few enquiries, but in the event he answered before I had voiced them. ‘We went to various doctors and they told me my sperm count was zero.’

Even in our disjointed, modern society, this is quite a taxing observation to counter with something meaningful. ‘How disappointing,’ I said.

‘Yes. It was. Very disappointing.’

Obviously I’d chosen badly. ‘Couldn’t they do something about it?’

‘Not really. They suggested reasons as to why it might have happened, but no one thought it could be reversed. So that was that.’

‘You could have tried other ways. They’re so clever now.’ I couldn’t bring myself to be more specific.

He shook his head. ‘I’d never have brought up someone else’s child.

Suzanne had a go at persuading me but I couldn’t allow it. I just didn’t see the point. Once the child isn’t yours, aren’t you just playing with dolls? Living dolls, maybe. But dolls.’

‘A lot of people would disagree with you.’

He nodded. ‘I know. Suzanne was one of them. She didn’t see why she had to be barren when it wasn’t her fault, which was reasonable enough. I suppose we knew we’d break up from the moment we left the surgery.’ He stood to fetch himself another drink. He’d earned it.

‘I see,’ I said, to fill the silence, rather dreading what was coming.

Sure enough, when he spoke again his tone was more determined than ever. ‘Two specialists believed it might have been the result of adult mumps.’

‘I thought that was a myth, used to frighten nervous, young men.’

‘It’s very rare. But it can happen. It’s a condition called orchitis, which affects the testicles. Usually it goes away and everything’s fine, but sometimes, very occasionally, it doesn’t. I didn’t have mumps as a boy and I wasn’t aware I’d ever caught it, but when I thought it over, I was struck down with a very sore throat a few days after I got back 

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from Portugal, in July of nineteen seventy. I was in bed for a couple of weeks and my glands certainly swelled up, so maybe they were right.’

I shifted slightly in my chair and took another sip of my drink. My presence here was beginning to make a kind of uncomfortable sense.

In a way I had invited Damian to Portugal, to join a group of friends.

God knows, in the event it was more complicated than that but the excuse had been the party was short of men and our hostess had got me to ask him. With disastrous results, as it happens. So, was he now trying to blame me for being sterile? Had I been invited here to acknowledge my fault? That as much harm as he had done to me on that holiday, so had I done to him? ‘I don’t remember anyone being ill,’ I said.

He did, apparently. ‘That girlfriend of the guy who had the villa.

The neurotic American with the pale hair. What was her name? Alice?

Alix? She kept complaining about her throat, the whole time we were there.’

‘You have wonderfully perfect recall.’

‘I’ve had a lot of time to think.’

The image of that sun whitened villa in Estoril, banished from my conscious mind for nearly four decades, suddenly filled my mind. The hot, blond beach below the terrace, drunken dinners resonating with sex and subtext, climbing the hill to the haunted castle at Cintra, swimming in the whispering, blue waters, waiting in the great square before Lisbon Cathedral to walk past the body of Salazar . . . The whole experience sprang back into vivid, technicoloured life, one of those holidays that bridge the gap between adolescence and maturity, with all the attendant dangers of that journey, where you come home quite different from when you set out. A holiday, in fact, that changed my life. I nodded. ‘Yes. Well, you would have done.’

‘Of course, if that were the reason, then I could have had a child before.’

Despite his seriousness I couldn’t match it. ‘Even you wouldn’t have had much time. We were only twenty-one. These days every girl on a housing estate may be pregnant by the time she’s thirteen, but it was different then.’ I smiled reassuringly, but he wasn’t watching. Instead, he was busy opening a drawer in a handsome bureau plat beneath the Lawrence. He took out an envelope and gave it to me. It wasn’t new. I 

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could just make out the postmark. It looked like ‘Chelsea. rd December .’

‘Please read it.’

I unfolded the paper gingerly. The letter was entirely typed, with neither opening greeting nor final signature written by hand. ‘Dear Shit,’ it began. How charming. I looked up with raised eyebrows.

‘Go on.’

Dear Shit, It is almost Christmas. It is also late and I am drunk and so I have found the nerve to say that you have made my life a living lie for nineteen years. I stare at my living lie each day and all because of you. No one will ever know the truth and I will probably burn this rather than send it, but you ought to realise where your deceit and my weakness have led me. I do not quite curse you, I could not do that, but I don’t forgive you, either, for the course my life has taken. I did not deserve it.

At the end, below the body of the text, the author had typed: ‘A fool.’

I stared at it. ‘Well, she did send it,’ I said. ‘I wonder if she meant to.’

‘Perhaps someone else picked it up from the hall table and posted it, without her knowledge.’

This seemed highly likely to me. ‘That would have given her a turn.’

‘You are sure it is a “her”?’

I nodded. ‘Aren’t you? “My life has been a living lie.” “Your deceit and my weakness.” None of it sounds very butch to me. I rather like her signing it “a fool.” It reminds me of the pop lyrics of our younger days. Anyway, I assume the base deceit to which she refers comes under the heading of romance. It doesn’t sound like someone feeling let down over a bad investment. That would make the writer female, wouldn’t it? Or has your life steered you along new and previously untried routes?’

‘It would make her female.’

‘There we are, then.’ I smiled. ‘I like the way she cannot curse you.

It’s quite Keatsian. Like a verse from ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’: “She weeps alone for pleasures not to be.”’

‘What do you think it means?’ 

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I wasn’t clear how there could be any doubt. ‘It’s not very mysterious,’ I said. But he waited, so I put it into words. ‘It sounds as if you have made somebody pregnant.’

‘Yes.’ ‘I assume the deceit she refers to must be some avowal of a forever kind of love, which you made in order to get her to remove her clothing.’

‘You sound very harsh.’

‘Do I? I don’t mean to. Like all of us boys in those days, I tried it often enough myself. Her “weakness” implies you were, in this instance, successful.’ But I thought over Damian’s original question about the letter’s meaning. Did it indicate that he thought things were not quite so straightforward? ‘Why? Is there another interpretation? I suppose this woman could have been in love with you and her life since then has been a lie because she married someone else when she’d rather have been with you. Is that what you think it is?’

‘No. Not really. If that’s all she meant, would she be writing about it twenty years later?’

‘Some people take longer than others to get over these things.’ ‘“I stare at my living lie each day.” “No one will ever know.” No one will ever know what?’ He asked the question as if there could be no doubt as to the answer. Which I agreed with.

I nodded. ‘As I said, you made her pregnant.’

He seemed almost reassured that there was no other possible meaning, as if he had been testing me. He nodded. ‘And she had the baby.’

‘Sounds like it. Though that in itself makes the whole affair something of a period piece. I wonder why she didn’t get rid of it.’

At this, Damian gave his unique blend of haughty look and dismissive snort. How well I remembered it. ‘I imagine abortion was against her principles. Some people do have principles.’

Now it was my turn to snort. ‘I’m not prepared to take instruction from you on that score,’ I said, which he let pass, as well he might. The whole thing was beginning to irritate me. Why were we making such a meal of it? ‘Very well, then. She had the baby. And nobody knows that you are the father. End of story.’ I stared at the envelope, so 

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carefully preserved. ‘At least, was it the end? Or was there some more?

After this?’

He nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I thought at the time. That it was the start of some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . extortion.’

‘Extortion?’

‘My lawyer’s word. I went to see him. He took a copy and told me to wait for the next approach. He said that clearly she was building up to a demand for money and we should be ready with a plan. I was in the papers a bit in those days and I’d already had some luck. It seemed likely that she’d suddenly understood her baby’s father was rich, and so now might be the moment for a killing. My offspring would have been about twenty then—’ ‘Nineteen,’ I said. ‘Her life was a living lie for nineteen years.’

He looked puzzled for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Nineteen and just starting out. Cash would have come in very useful.’ He looked at me. I didn’t have anything to add since, like the lawyer, I thought this all made sense. ‘I would have given her something.’ He was quite defensive. ‘I was perfectly prepared to.’

‘But she didn’t write again.’

‘No.’ ‘Perhaps she died.’

‘Perhaps. Although it seems rather melodramatic. Perhaps, as you say, the letter got posted by accident. Anyway, we heard nothing more and gradually the thing drifted away.’

‘So why are we discussing it now?’

He did not answer me immediately. Instead, he stood up and crossed to the chimneypiece. A log had rolled forward on to the hearth and he took up the tools to rectify it, doing so with a kind of deadly intensity.

‘The thing is,’ he said at last, speaking into the flames but presumably addressing me, ‘I want to find the child.’

There didn’t seem to be any logic in this. If he’d wanted to ‘do the right thing,’ why hadn’t he done it eighteen years before, when there might have been some point? ‘Isn’t it a bit late?’ I asked. ‘It wouldn’t have been easy to play dad when she wrote the letter; but by now the “child” is a man or woman in their late thirties. They are what they are, and it’s far too late to help shape them now.’

None of this seemed to carry any weight whatever. I’m not sure he 

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even heard. ‘I want to find them,’ he repeated. ‘I want you to find them.’

It would be foolish to pretend that I had not by this stage worked out that this was where we were headed. But it was not a task I relished.

Nor was I in the least sure I would undertake it. ‘Why me?’

‘When I met you I had only slept with four girls.’ He paused. I raised my eyebrows faintly. Any man of my generation will understand that this was impressive in itself. At nineteen, which is what we were when we first came across each other, I do not believe I had done much more than kiss on the dance floor. He hadn’t finished. ‘I knew all four until well into the early s and it definitely wasn’t one of them.

Then you and I ran around for a while, and I kept myself fairly busy.

A couple of years later, when that period had come to an end, we went to Portugal. And after that I was sterile. Besides, look at the writing, look at the paper, read the phrases. This woman is educated—’ ‘And histrionic. And drunk.’

‘Which does not prevent her being posh.’

‘I’ll say.’ I considered his theory some more. ‘What about the years between the end of the Season and Portugal?’

He shook his head. ‘A few, mainly scrubbers, and a couple left over from our times together. Not one who had a baby before that summer.’

He sighed wearily. ‘Anyway, nobody lives a lie who hasn’t got something to lose. Something worth holding on to, something that would be endangered by the truth. She wrote to me in  when the upper and upper middle classes occupied the last remaining bastion of legitimate birth. Anyone normal would have let the secret out of the bag long ago.’ The effort of saying all this, plus the log work, had depleted what remained of his energy and he sank back into his chair with a groan.

I did not pity him. Quite the contrary. Suddenly the unreasonableness of his request struck me forcibly. ‘But I’m not in your life.

I am nothing to do with you. We are completely different people.’ I wasn’t insulting him. I simply could not see why any of this was my responsibility. ‘We may have known each other once, but we don’t now.

We went to some dances together forty years ago. And quarrelled.

There must be others who are far closer to you than I ever was. I can’t be the only person who could take this on.’

‘But you are. These women came from your people, not mine. I 

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have no other friends who would know them, or even know of them.

And in fact, if we are having this conversation, I have no other friends.’

This was too self-serving for my taste. ‘Then you have no friends at all, because you certainly can’t count me.’ Naturally, once the words were out I rather regretted them. I did believe that he was dying and there was no point in punishing him now for things that could never be undone, whatever he or I might wish.

But he smiled. ‘You’re right. I have no friends. As you know better than most, it’s not a relationship I could ever either understand or manage. If you will not do this for me I have no one else to ask. I cannot even hire a detective. The information I need would not be available to anyone but an insider.’ I was about to suggest he undertake the search himself, but looking at his shaking, hollow frame, the words died on my lips. ‘Will you do it?’ he asked after a brief pause.

At this point, I was quite sure that I really didn’t want to. Not just because of the prickly, time-wasting and awkward nature of the quest, but because the more I thought about it, the more I knew I didn’t want to poke around in my own past, any more than his. The time he spoke of was over. For both of us. I had hardly kept up with anyone from those days, for reasons which involved him, as he knew, and what was there to gain by rootling around in it all? I decided to make a last attempt to appeal to his better nature. Even people like Damian Baxter must have a little. ‘Damian, think. Do you really want to turn their life upside down? This man, this woman, they know who they are and they’re living their life as best they can. Will it help to find they’re someone different and unknown? To make them question, or even break with, their parents? Would you want that on your conscience?’

He looked at me quite steadily. ‘My fortune, after death duties, will be far in excess of five hundred million pounds. My intention is to make my child sole heir. Are you prepared to take the responsibility for denying them their inheritance? Would you want that on your conscience?’

Naturally, it would have been jejune to pretend that this did not make all the difference in the world. ‘How would I set about it?’ I said.

He relaxed. ‘I will present you with a list of the girls I slept with during those years, who had a child before April .’ This was again impressive. The list of girls I had slept with during the same period, 

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with or without children, could have been contained on the blank side of a visiting card. It was also very precise and oddly businesslike. I had thought we were engaged in some sort of philosophical exchange but I saw now we were approaching what used to be called ‘brass tacks.’ He obviously sensed my surprise. ‘My secretary has made a start. There didn’t seem much point in your getting in touch if they hadn’t had a baby.’ Which was of course true. ‘I believe the list is comprehensive.’

‘What about the girls you slept with who did not bear children at that time?’

‘Don’t let’s worry about them. No point in making work.’ He smiled.

‘We’ve done a lot of weeding. There were a couple of others I slept with who did have an early child but, in the words of the Empress Euge´nie’s mother when challenged over her Imperial daughter’s paternity, les dates ne correspondent pas.’ He laughed, easier now that he saw his plan would come to fruition. ‘I want you to know that I have taken this seriously and there is a real possibility that it could be any one of the listed names.’

‘So how do I go about it?’

‘Just get in touch. With one exception, I’ve got the present addresses.’

‘Why don’t you ask them to have a DNA test?’

‘That sort of woman would never agree.’

‘You romanticise them in your dislike. I suspect they would. And their children certainly would when they found out why.’

‘No.’ He was suddenly quite firm again. I could see my comment had annoyed him. ‘I don’t want this to be a story. Only the true child must know I’m looking for them. When they have the money it will be their choice to reveal how or why they got it. Until then, this is for my private satisfaction, not public consumption. Test one who isn’t my child and we will read the story in the Daily Mail the following week.’

He shook his head. ‘Maybe we should test them at the last, but only when you have elected which of the said progeny is probably mine.’

‘But suppose one of the women had a baby without anyone knowing and put it up for adoption?’

‘They haven’t done that. At least, the mother of my baby hasn’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because then she wouldn’t have stared at her lie every day.’

I had nothing further to say, at least until I’d thought about it all 

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some more, which Damian seemed to understand and did not wish to challenge. He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. ‘I’m going to bed now. I haven’t been up as late as this for months. You will find the list in an envelope in your room. If you wish, we can discuss it some more tomorrow morning before you go. At the risk of sounding vulgar, as you would say, you’ll also find a credit card, which will cover any expenses you care to charge on it during your enquiries. I will not question whatever you choose to use it for.’

This last detail actively annoyed me as it was deliberately phrased in a manner designed to make me think him generous. But nothing about this commission was generous. It was a hideous imposition. ‘I haven’t agreed yet,’ I said.

‘I hope you will.’ He was at the door when he stopped. ‘Do you ever see her now?’ he asked, confident that I would require no prompting as to the object of his enquiry. Which was correct.

‘No. Not really.’ I thought for a painful moment. ‘Very occasionally, at a party or a wedding or something. But not really.’

‘You aren’t enemies?’

‘Oh, no. We smile. And even talk. We’re certainly not enemies. We’re not anything.’

He hesitated, as if he were pondering whether to go down this path.

‘You know I was mad.’

‘Yes.’ ‘But I want you to understand that I know it, too. I went completely mad.’ He paused, as if I might come in with some suitable response.

But there wasn’t one. ‘Would it help if I said I was sorry?’ he asked.

‘Not terribly.’

He nodded, absorbing the information. We both knew there was nothing further to add. ‘Stay down here as long as you like. Have some more whisky and look at the books. Some of them will interest you.’

But I wasn’t quite finished. ‘Why have you left it until now?’ I said.

‘Why didn’t you make enquiries when you first got the letter?’

This did make him pause and ponder, as the light from the hall came through the now open door and deepened the lines of his ravaged face. Presumably he asked himself the same question a thousand times a day. ‘I don’t know. Not completely. Maybe I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone feeling they had a claim against me. I didn’t see how I could 

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find and identify them without giving them some power. And I’d never really wanted a child. Which is probably why I wouldn’t listen to my wife’s pleadings. It wasn’t one of my ambitions. I don’t think I was ever naturally paternal.’

‘Yet now you are prepared to give this unknown stranger enough money to build a small industrial town. Why? What’s changed?’

Damian thought for a moment and a tiny sigh made his thin shoulders rise and fall. The jacket, which must once have fitted flawlessly, flapped loosely around his shrivelled frame. ‘I’m dying and I have no beliefs,’ he said simply. ‘This is my only chance of immortality.’

Then he was gone and I was left to enjoy his library alone.



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TWO

I have never been a good judge of character. My impressions at first meeting are almost invariably wrong. Although, human nature being what it is, many years had to pass before I could bring myself to admit it. When I was young I thought I had a marvellous instinct to tell good from bad, fine from shoddy, sacred from profane. Damian Baxter, by contrast, was an expert at assessment. He knew at once I was a patsy.

As it happens, we had both gone up to Cambridge in September , but we were in different colleges and we moved in different crowds, so it was not until the beginning of the summer term of , in early May I think, that our paths first crossed, at a party in the Fellows’ Quadrangle of my college, where I was no doubt showing off.

I was nineteen and in that heady stage of life for someone like me, at least for someone like me then, when you suddenly realise that the world is more complicated than you had supposed, that there is in fact a vast assortment of people and opportunities on offer, and you will not be obliged to continue forever in the narrow channel of boarding school and county, which was all that that my so-called ‘privileged’ upbringing had yielded thus far. I would not say that I was ever antisocial but nor would I claim much social success before that time.

I had been rather overshadowed by handsome and witty cousins, and since I possessed neither looks nor a trace of charisma to offset this, there wasn’t much I could do to make my presence felt.

My dear mother understood my predicament, which she was obliged to witness silently and painfully for years, but found there was little she could do to remedy it. Until, seeing the burgeoning confidence that admission to university had brought, she decided to take advantage of it to promote a spirit of adventure within me, providing introductions 

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to London friends with suitably aged daughters. Surprisingly perhaps, I had followed her lead and begun to construct a new social group for myself, where I would have no more depressing comparisons to contend with and where I could, to an extent anyway, reinvent myself.

It would seem odd to today’s young that I should have allowed myself to be so parentally steered, but things were different forty years ago. To start with, people were not then afraid of getting older. Our strange, patronising culture, where middle-aged television presenters dishonestly pretend to share the tastes and prejudices of their teenage audience in order to gain their trust, had not arrived. In short, in this as in so many areas, we did not think in the way that people think today. Of course, we were divided by political opinions and class and, to a lesser extent than now, religion, but the key difference, from today’s viewpoint, is not between the Right and the Left, or the aristocratic and the ordinary, but between the generation of  and the people of four decades later.

In my world, parents in the early Sixties still arranged their children’s lives to an extraordinary extent, settling between themselves when parties would be given and at which houses during the school holidays, what subjects their offspring would study at school; what careers they should pursue after university; above all, what friends they would spend time with. It wasn’t, on the whole, tyrannical but we did not much challenge our parents’ veto when it was exercised. I remember a local baronet’s heir, frequently drunk and invariably rude, and for these reasons beguiling to me and my sister and repulsive to our parents, who was actually forbidden entry to our house by my father, ‘except where his absence would cause comment.’ Can such a phrase really have been spoken within living memory? I know we laughed about this rule even then. But we did not break it. In short, we were a product of our backgrounds in a way that would be rare today. One hears people wonder about the collapse of parental authority. Was it deliberately engineered as the right-wing press would have us believe? Or did it just happen because it was right for the time, like the internal combustion engine or penicillin? Either way, it has vanished from whole chunks of our society, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

At any rate, to resume, that spring there was a drinks party in the Fellows’ Quadrangle to which I’d been invited for some reason. I cannot 

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now say if it was an official function or a private bash, but anyway there we all were, feeling clever and chosen, and probably still enjoying the college’s reputation for being ‘rather smart.’ How pitiful such minivanities seem, viewed from the tired vale of the middle years, but I don’t believe there was much harm in us, really. We thought we were grown up, which we weren’t, and posh, which we weren’t very, and that people would be glad to know us. I say this although, after my painful youth, I still preserved that all too familiar blend of pride and terror, that is so characteristic of the late teens, when nose-in-air snobbery goes hand in hand with social paranoia. Presumably it was this contradictory mixture that made me so vulnerable to attack.

Oddly enough, I can recall the precise moment when Damian entered my life. It was fitting because I was talking to Serena when he appeared, so we both met him together, simultaneously, on the instant, a detail that seems much more curious on reflection than when I was living it. I don’t know why she was there. She was never a college groupie. Perhaps she was staying with someone nearby and had been brought. At any rate I won’t find the answer now. I didn’t know Serena at all well then, not as I would later, but we’d met. This is a distinction lost on the modern world, where people who have shaken hands and nodded a greeting will tell you they ‘know’ each other. Sometimes they will go further and assert, without any more to go on, that so-and-so is ‘a friend of mine.’ If it should suit the other party they will endorse this fiction and, in that endorsement, sort of make it true. When it is not true. Forty years ago we were, I think, more aware of the degree of a relationship. Which was just as well with someone as far beyond my reach as Serena.

Lady Serena Gresham, as she was born, did not appear to suffer from the marbling of self-doubt that afflicted the rest of us and this made her stand out among us from the start. I could describe her as ‘unusually confident,’ but this would be misleading, as the phrase suggests some bright and brash self-marketeer, the very last description she would merit. It just never occurred to her to worry much about who or what she was. She never questioned whether people would like her, nor picked at the thing when they did. She was, one might say nowadays, at peace with herself and, in the teenage years, then as now, it made her special. Her gentle remoteness, a kind of floating, almost underwater 

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quality, took possession of me from the first time I saw her and many years would pass before she did not pop into my defenceless brain at least once every half an hour. I know now that the main reason she seemed remote was because she wasn’t interested in me, or in most of us for that matter, but then it was pure magic. I would say it was her dreamy unattainability, more than her beauty or birth or privileges, though these were mighty, that gave her the position she enjoyed.

And I know I am not alone in thinking of  as the Year of Serena.

Even as early as the spring, I felt myself lucky to be talking to her.

As I have said, her privileges were great, if not unique, as a member of the select, surviving rump of the Old World. At that time, self-made fortunes were usually much smaller than they would be decades later and the very rich, at least those people who ‘lived rich,’ still tended mostly to be those who had been even richer thirty years before. It was an odd era for them, poor devils. So many families had gone to the wall in the post-war years. Friends they had dined and danced and hunted with before  had tumbled down in the wreckage of their kind and it would not be long before most of the fallen had been engulfed by the upper middle class, never to regain their lost status.

Even among those who had kept the faith, still in their houses, still shooting their own pheasants, there were many who gloomily subscribed to the philosophy of apre`s moi le de´luge, and regularly vans would chug away, out through the gates towards the London auction houses, bearing the treasures that had been centuries in the assembling, so the family could stay warm and have something decent to wear for one more winter.

But Serena was not afflicted by these pressures. She and the rest of the Greshams were part of the Chosen (very) Few and lived much as they had always lived. Perhaps there were only two footmen where once there had been six. Perhaps the chef had to manage on his own and I do not believe Serena or her sisters enjoyed the services of a lady’s maid. But otherwise not much had altered since the early s, apart from their hemlines and being allowed to dine in restaurants.

Her father was the ninth Earl of Claremont, a mellow, even charming, title and when I knew him, as I would do later, he was himself a mellow and charming man, never cross because he had never been 

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crossed and so, like his daughter, very easy to be with. He too lived in a benign mist, although, unlike Serena, he was not a creature of myth, a lovely naiad eluding her swain. His vagueness was more akin to Mr Pastry. Either way, he never had much grasp of hard reality. Indeed, at times it felt as if the family’s soothing title had generated a placid sense of unquestioning acceptance in the dynasty, for which I now think, looking back, they were to be envied. I did not at that time believe that loving came easily to any of them, certainly not ‘being in love,’ which would have involved far too much disruption, with its horrid, sticky threats of indigestion and broken sleep, but they did not hate or quarrel either.

Not that acceptance of their lot was very difficult. By dint of judicious investment and far-sighted marriage, the family had more than survived the rocky seas of the twentieth century thus far, with large estates in Yorkshire, a castle somewhere in Ireland, which I never saw, and a house on Millionaires’ Row, the private road running parallel to Kensington Palace, which was then considered quite something. These days, eastern potentates and people who own football clubs seem to have snapped up those vast edifices and made them private again, but at that time they had mostly fallen into embassies, one by one, with scarcely a family left. Except, of course, for the Claremonts, who occupied number , a lovely s stone wedding cake, a shade too near Notting Hill.

As if this were not enough, Serena was also very beautiful, with thick, russet hair and a complexion lifted straight from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Her features added to her gift of serenity, of real grace, which is an unlikely word to use of a girl of eighteen, but in her case a truthful one. I do not know exactly what we talked about, either at that party in Cambridge or at the many gatherings and house parties where we would meet over the next two years, sometimes art, I think, or maybe history. She was never much of a gossip. This was not a tribute to her kindness so much as to her lack of interest in other people’s lives. Nor would there have been talk of a career, although she is not to blame for that. Even in the late Sixties, serious professional ambition would have marked her out uncomfortably among her contemporaries. That said, I was never bored in her company, not least because I must have been in love with her even then, long before I would acknowledge the fact, 

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but the hopelessness implicit in loving such a star would have been all too obvious to that bundle of insecurities I call my unconscious mind and I shied away from certain failure. As anyone would.

‘Can I talk to you?’ said a deep, pleasant voice, just as I was approaching the punchline of a story. We looked up to find we had been joined

by Damian Baxter. And we were glad of it which, to me now, is the strangest detail of all. ‘I don’t know anyone here,’ he added with a smile that would have melted Greenland. My impressions of Damian have been so overlaid by what came after that it is hard for me to dredge up my early feelings, but there’s no doubt that he was wonderfully attractive in those days, to men, women and children alike. Apart from anything else, he was so handsome, in a healthy, open-air sort of way, very handsome really, with bright, almost unnervingly blue eyes and thick, dark, wavy hair, worn long and in curls, as we all wore it then. He was fit, too, and muscular but without being sporty, or, worse, hearty, at all.

He was just redolent of both health and intelligence, an unusual combination in my experience, and he looked as if he slept ten hours every night and had never tasted alcohol. Neither of which would be borne out by the facts.

‘Well, now you know us,’ said Serena and held out her hand.

I need hardly say that of course he knew exactly who we were. Or rather, who she was. He gave himself away later that evening, when we ended up squashed into a corner table in a dubious and rather cramped restaurant off Magdalene Street. We had picked up a couple of other students when the drinks party disbanded but Serena was not with us.

It would have been unusual if she had been. It was rare for her to drift into that kind of easily accessible arrangement. She usually had a good, if unspecified, reason for not joining in.

The waiter brought the obligatory, steaming plates of boeuf bourgignon, with its glutinous and shiny sauce, that seemed to be our staple fare. This is not a criticism of the eaterie in question, more an acknowledgement of how and what we ate then, but I must not be ungrateful. Mounds of glazed stew, with rough red wine, was a big leg up, considering what had been on offer ten years before. There is, and should be, worthwhile debate about the merits of the changes the last four decades have brought to our society, but there can be few who do not welcome the improvement of English food, at least until the raw 

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fish and general undercooking that arrived with the celebrity chefs of the new century. There is no doubt about it that when I was a child the food available to the general British public was simply pitiful, consisting largely of tasteless school dinners, with vegetables that had been boiling since the war. Occasionally, you might find something better on offer in a private house, but even smart restaurants served fussy, dainty platefuls, decorated with horrible rosettes of green mayonnaise and the like, that were more trouble in the eating than they were ever worth. So when the bistros began to arrive, with their check tablecloths and melting candles pushed into the necks of green wine bottles, we were glad of them. A decade later they had become a joke, but then they were our salvation.

‘Have you ever been to Serena’s house in Yorkshire?’ Damian asked.

The other two looked puzzled, as well they might, since there had been no mention of Yorkshire or of the Claremont dynasty at any part of the conversation.

This should have set off a thousand flashing bells, but, like the fool I was, I made nothing of it. I simply answered the question. ‘Once, but just for a charity thing a couple of years ago.’

‘What’s it like?’

I thought for a moment. I hadn’t retained any very precise image. ‘A Georgian pile. Very grand. But pretty.’

‘And big?’

‘Oh, yes, big. Not Blenheim. But big.’

‘I suppose you’ve always known each other?’ Again, as I would come to recognise, this was a clue, had I the sense to read it. From long before that evening Damian had a fiercely romantic view of the golden group from which he felt excluded, but which he was determined to enter.

Although, looking back, even in  it was a slightly odd ambition, especially for someone like Damian Baxter. Not that there weren’t plenty who shared it (and plenty who still do), but Damian was a modern creature, motivated, ambitious, strong – and if I say it of him it must be true. He was always going to find a place in the new society that was coming. Why did he want to bother with the fading glories of the blue bloods, those sad walking history books, when, for so many of those families, as with the potato, the best was already in the ground?

Personally, I think he must have been cut dead at some gathering in 

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youth, in front of a girl he fancied perhaps, snubbed, ignored and insulted by a drunken toff, until he fell into the cliche´’d but very real goal of: ‘I’ll show you! Just you wait! ’ It has, after all, been the spur of many great careers since the Conquest. But if this was the case, I never knew the incident that triggered it. Only that by the time we met, he had developed a personal mythology about the British aristocracy. He saw all its members as bonded together from birth, a tiny, tight club, hostile to newcomers, loyal to the point of reckless dishonesty when defending their own. There was some truth in this, of course, a good deal of truth in terms of attitude, but we were no longer living under a Whig oligarchy of a few thousand families. By the s the catchment area, certainly for what remained of London Society, was far wider than he seemed aware of and the variety of types within it was much greater.

Anyway, people are people, whoever they may be, and no world is as neat as he would have it.

‘No. I haven’t known her long at all, not properly. I might have met her a few times over the years, at this and that, but we only really talked for the first time at a tea party in Eaton Square a month or two ago.’

He seemed amused. ‘A tea party?’ It did sound rather quaint.

The tea party had, in fact, been given by a girl called Miranda Houghton at her parents’ flat on the north side of Eaton Square.

Miranda was the god-daughter of my aunt or of some friend of my mother’s, I forget which. Like Serena, I’d seen her from time to time but without either of us making much of an impact; still, it qualified me for her guest list when the whole business began. These parties were one of the early rituals of the Season, even if, when recording it, one feels like an obscure archivist preserving for posterity the lost traditions of the Inuits. The girls would be encouraged to invite other would-be debutantes to tea, usually at their parents’ London homes, thereby forging useful friendships and associations for the larks to come. Their mothers would obtain lists of who else was doing the whole thing from the unofficial but widely recognised leader, Peter Townend, who would supply them free of charge and gladly, to those he considered worthy, in his gallant but doomed attempt to stave off the modern world for as long as might conceivably be possible. Later these same mothers would require of him other lists of supposedly eligible men and he would produce these too, although they were required more for drinks parties 

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and dances than the teas, where men were few and normally, as in the case of me and Miranda, actually knew the hostess. Very little, if any, tea was provided or drunk at these gatherings and in my experience the atmosphere was always slightly strange, as each new arrival hesitantly picked their way across the floor. But all the same we went to them, me included. So I suppose we were committed to the coming experience from comparatively early on, whatever we might afterwards pretend.

I was sitting in the corner, talking about hunting to a rather dull girl with freckles, when Serena Gresham came in and I could tell at once, from the faintest frisson that went through the assembled company, that she had already earned a reputation as a star. This was all the better managed as no one could have been less presumptuous or more softly spoken than she. Happily for me, I was near the last remaining empty chair. I waved to her and, after taking a second to remember who I was, she crossed the room and joined me. It is interesting to me now that Serena should have conformed to all this. Twenty years later, when the Season had become the preserve of exhibitionists and the daughters of parvenu mothers on the make, she would not have dreamed of it. I suppose it is a tribute to the fact that even someone as seemingly untrammelled as Serena would still, in those dead days, do as she was told.

‘How do you know Miranda?’ I asked.

‘I don’t, really,’ was her answer. ‘We met when we were both staying with some cousins of mine in Rutland.’ One of Serena’s gifts was always to answer every question quickly and easily, without a trace of mystery, but without imparting any information.

I nodded. ‘So, will you be doing the whole deb thing?’

I do not wish to exaggerate my own importance, but I’m not convinced that before this she had fully faced the extent of the undertaking.

She thought for a moment, frowning. ‘I don’t know.’ She seemed to be looking into some invisible crystal ball, hovering in mid-air. ‘We’ll have to see,’ she added and, in doing so, gave me a sense of her halfmembership of the human race that was at the heart of her charm, a kind of emotional platform ticket that would allow her to withdraw at any moment from the experience on hand. I was entranced by her.

I outlined a little of this to Damian as we ate. He was fascinated by every detail, like an anthropologist who has long proclaimed a theory 

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as an article of faith, but only recently begun to discover any real evidence of its truth. I suspect that Serena was the first completely genuine aristocrat he had ever met and, perhaps to his relief, he found her to be entirely undisappointing. She was in truth exactly what people reading historical novels, bought from a railway bookshop before a long and boring journey, imagine aristocratic heroines to be, both in her serene beauty and in her cool, almost cold, detachment. Despite what they themselves might like to think, there are few aristocrats who conform very satisfactorily to the imagined prototype and it was Damian’s good fortune, or bad, that he should have begun his social career with one who did so perfectly. It was clear that for him there was something wonderfully satisfactory in the encounter. Of course, had he been less fortunate in his introduction to that world he might have been luckier in the way things turned out.

‘So how do you get on to the list for these tea parties?’ he asked.

The thing was, I liked him. It feels odd to write those words and there have been times when I have quite forgotten it, but I did. He was fun and entertaining and good-looking, always a recommendation for anyone where I’m concerned, and he had that quality, now dignified with the New Age term of Positive Energy, but which then simply indicated someone who would never wear you out. Years later, a friend would describe her world to me as being peopled entirely by radiators and drains. If so, then Damian was King Radiator. He warmed the company he was in. He could make people want to help him, which alchemy he practised, most successfully, on me.

As it happened, in this instance I could not deliver what Damian was asking for, as he had really missed the tea parties. These little informal gatherings were very much a preliminary weeding process, when the girls would seek out their playmates for the coming year within the overall group, and by the time of our Cambridge dinner the gangs were formed and the cocktail parties had already begun, although, as I told him, the first I was due to attend was not in fact a deb party as such, but one of a series given by Peter Townend, the Season’s Master of the Ceremonies, at his London flat. It may seem strange to a student of these rites to learn that for the last twenty or thirty years of their existence they were entirely managed by an unknown northerner of no birth and modest means, but the fact remains that they were. Naturally, 

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Damian had heard the name and almost immediately, with his houndlike scent for quarry, he asked if he might tag along, and I agreed. This was distinctly risky on my part as Townend was jealous of his powers and privileges, and to turn up casually with a hanger-on, was to risk devaluing the invitation, which he would certainly not take kindly.

Nevertheless, I did it and so, a week or two later, when I parked my battered green mini without difficulty in Chelsea Manor Street, Damian Baxter was sitting beside me in the passenger seat.

I say Peter was jealous of his role and so he was, but he was entitled to be. From a modest background, with which he was perfectly content, and after a career in journalism and editing where his speciality was genealogy, he had one day discovered his personal vocation would be to keep the Season alive, when Her Majesty’s decision to end Presentation in  had seemed to condemn the whole institution to immediate execution. We know now that it was instead destined to die a lingering death, and maybe simple decapitation might have been preferable, but nobody knows the future and at that time it seemed that Peter, single-handedly, had won it an indefinite reprieve. The Monarch would play no further part in it, of course, which knocked the point and the stuffing out of it for many, but it would still have a purpose in bringing together the offspring of like-minded parents, and this was the responsibility he took on. He had no hope of reward. He did it solely for the honour of the thing, which in my book makes it praiseworthy, whatever one’s opinion of the end product. Year by year he would comb the stud books, Peerage and Gentry, writing to the mothers of daughters, interviewing their sons, all to buy another few months for the whole business. Can this really have been only forty years ago? you may ask in amazement. The answer’s yes.

Peter’s own gatherings were not to select or encourage the girls. That had all been done some time before. No, they were basically to audition those young men who had come to his attention as possible escorts and dancing partners for the parties to come. Having been vetted, their names would either be underscored or crossed off the lists that were distributed to the anxious waiting mothers, who would assume that the cads and seducers, the alcoholics and the gamblers and those who were NSIT (not safe in taxis) would all have been excised from the names presented. They should have been, of course, but it was not 

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entirely plain sailing, viz. the first two young men to greet us as we pushed into the narrow hall of the squashed and ill-furnished flat, at the top of a block built in the worst traditions of the late s. These were the younger sons of the Duke of Trent, Lord Richard and Lord George Tremayne, who were both already drunk. A stranger might have thought that since neither was attractive or funny in the least, Peter would not deem them ideally suited to the year ahead. But this would be to ignore human nature and it was not really his fault that there were those he could not exclude. Certainly, the Tremayne brothers would enjoy a kind of popularity, somehow acquiring the reputation for being ‘live wires,’ which they were not. The fact is their father was a duke and, even if he could not have held down the job of a parking attendant in the real world, that was enough to guarantee their invitations.

We moved on into the crowded, main room, I hesitate to call it the drawing room, since it had many functions, but that was where we found Peter, his characteristic cowlick of hair falling over his crumpled, pug-like face. He pointed at Damian. ‘Who he?’ he said in a loud and overtly hostile voice.

‘May I introduce Damian Baxter?’ I said.

‘I never invited him,’ said Peter, quite unrelenting. ‘What’s he doing here?’ Peter had, as I have said, made a decision not to pass himself off as a product of the system he so admired and in a moment like this I understood why. Since he had not posited himself as an elegant gentleman, he did not feel any need to be polite if it did not suit him. In short, he never disguised his feelings, and over the years I came both to like and to admire him for it. Of course, his words may read as if his anger was directed towards the unwelcome guest, when it was instead entirely meant for me. I was the one who had broken the rules.

In the face of this attack I’m afraid I foundered. It seems odd, certainly to the man I am today, but I know I was suddenly anxious at the thought of all those treats, which I had planned for and which were in his gift, slipping away. It might have been less troublesome if they had.

‘Don’t blame him,’ said Damian, seeing the problem and moving quickly in beside us. ‘Blame me. I very much wanted to meet you, Mr Townend, and when I heard he was coming here I forced him to bring me. It’s entirely my fault.’ 

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Peter stared at him. ‘That’s my cue to say you’re welcome, I suppose.’

His tone could not have been less hospitable but Damian, as ever, was unfazed. ‘It’s your cue to ask me to leave if you wish. And of course I will.’ He paused, a trace of anxiety playing across his even features.

‘Very smooth,’ said Peter in his curious, ambiguous, almost petulant way. He nodded towards a bewildered Spaniard holding a tray. ‘You can have a drink if you like.’ I do not at all believe he was won over by Damian’s charm, then or later. I would say he simply recognised a fellow player who might be possessed of great skill and was reluctant to make an enemy of him on their first encounter. As Damian moved away, Peter turned back to me. ‘Who is he? And where did he pick you up?’ This in itself was curiously phrased.

‘Cambridge. I met him at a party in my college. As to who he is,’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t know much about him, really.’

‘Nor will you.’

I felt rather defensive. ‘He’s very nice.’ I wasn’t quite sure how or why I’d been cast as protector, but apparently I had. ‘And I thought you might like him, too.’

Peter followed Damian with his eyes, as he took a drink and started to chat up a wretched overweight girl with a lantern jaw, who was hovering nervously on the edge of the proceedings. ‘He’s an operator,’ he said and turned to greet some new arrivals.

If he was an operator, the operation bore fruit almost immediately.

This would not have surprised me much further on in our acquaintance, as by then I would have known that Damian would never be so idle as to waste an opportunity. He was always a worker. His worst enemy would concede that. In fact, he just did. Damian had, after all, made it into Peter’s sanctum without any guarantee of a return engagement.

There was no time to be lost.

The awkward lantern-jawed girl, whom I now recognised gazing up at Damian as he showered her with charm, went by the name of Georgina Waddilove. She was the daughter of a city banker and an American heiress. Quite how Damian had selected her for his opening salvo I am not entirely sure. Perhaps it was just a warrior’s sense of where the wall might most easily be breached and which girl was the most vulnerable to attack. Georgina was a melancholy character. To anyone who was interested, and there were not many, this could be 

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traced to her mother who, with an imprecise knowledge of England and after a courtship conducted entirely during her husband’s posting in New York after the war, had been under the illusion at the time of her wedding that she was marrying into a much higher caste than was in fact the case. When they did return to England, in late , with two little boys and a baby daughter, she had arrived in her new country with confident expectations of stalking at Balmoral and foursome suppers at Chatsworth and Stratfieldsaye. What she discovered, however, was that her husband’s friends and family came, almost exclusively, from the same prosperous, professional money-people that she had played tennis with in the Hamptons since her girlhood. Her husband, Norman (and perhaps the name should have given her a clue), had not consciously meant to deceive her but, like many Englishmen of his type, particularly when abroad, he had fallen into the habit of suggesting that he came from a smarter background than he did and, far away in New York, this was only too easy. After spending nine years there he came almost to believe his own fiction. He would talk so freely of Princess Margaret or the Westminsters or Lady Pamela Berry, that he would probably have been as surprised as his listeners to discover that everything he knew of these people he had gleaned from the pages of the Daily Express.

The net result of this disappointment was not, however, divorce.

Anne Waddilove had her children to think about and divorce in the s still exacted a high social price. Norman had made quite a lot of money, so instead she resolved to use it to correct for her offspring the deficiencies and disappointments of her own existence. For the boys this meant good schools, shooting and proper universities, but from early on she was determined to launch her daughter with a dizzying season that would result in a dazzling marriage. Grandchildren would then follow, who would do her Royal stalking by proxy. So did Mrs Waddilove plan the future of the wretched Georgina, condemned to live her mother’s life and not her own from more or less the moment the child could walk. Which may explain the parent’s blindness to a simple truth, so clear to the rest of the world, that Georgina was hopelessly unsuited to the role expected of her. Good-looking and poised as Anne Waddilove was, she had not anticipated that nature would play a joke on her in giving her a daughter who was as plain as 

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a pikestaff, fat as a barrel and gauche to boot. To make matters worse, Georgina’s shy nervousness invariably gave a (false) first impression of stupidity, nor was she at all, by choice, gregarious. Since she wasn’t in line for a major inheritance – the presence of two boys in a family generally knocks that on the head – the match Mrs Waddilove had dreamed of seemed what can only be described as highly unlikely by the time Georgina had completed her first few weeks as a debutante.

I have to say that when I got to know her I liked Georgina Waddilove and, while I cannot pretend to a romantic interest in her at any point, I was always happy to sit next to her at dinner. She was knowledgeable about films, one of my interests, so we had plenty to talk about. But there was no escaping the fact that she did not appear destined for success in the harsh and competitive arena her mother had chosen.

There was something almost grotesque in watching her lumpen frame wandering, sad and alone, through ballroom after ballroom, decked out in the girlish fashions of the day, her hair sewn with flowers, her frock made of lace, when all the time she resembled nothing so much as a talking chimp in an advertisement for PG Tips tea. I’m sorry to say that she became, if anything, a comic figure among our crowd and, older as I am now and less impervious to others’ suffering, I very much regret this. It must have caused her great pain, which she concealed, and the concealment can only have made it sharper.

Was it an instinct for this that took Damian straight to her side, when shining beauties of high rank stood about Peter’s drawing room, laughing and chatting and sipping their drinks? Was it as a fox might scent a wounded bird that Damian surveyed the crowd, locating the ugliest, most awkward girl there, and made for her like a missile? If so, his tactic was completely successful and a few days later he dropped by my rooms to show that the morning’s post had brought his first stiffy, a thick white card bearing the proud, engraved name of ‘Mrs Norman Waddilove, At Home,’ who was inviting him to attend a cocktail party ‘for Georgina,’ on the seventh of June, by the Dodgem Track at Battersea Fun Fair. ‘How can she be “at home” by the Dodgems?’ he said.

Battersea Park has altered its position in London in the decades since the war. It has not moved physically, of course, but it is an entirely different place today from the scene of so many childhood memories 

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of half a century ago. Built by the Victorians as a pleasure ground for the local bourgeoisie, with sculpted rocks and fountains and gentle paths by swan-stocked lakes, the park had cheerfully run to seed by the s and had become instead important to a whole generation of children as the site of London’s only permanent fun fair. Erected in , as part of that icon of lost innocence, the Festival of Britain, the fair flourished into the Sixties, when newer forms of entertainment began to steal its thunder. A tragic accident on the Big Dipper in  hastened the inevitable and two years later came closure. The dear, old fun fair, grey and grubby and downright dangerous as it had become, was swept away without a trace, like the hanging gardens of Nineveh.

It is more beautiful today, its ponds and waterfalls and glades restored, than when I first walked there, clutching the hand of an aunt or a nanny and begging to be allowed one more ride before we went home, but it is not more beautiful to me. Nor am I alone in this rosetinted memory and, in fact, nostalgia was already beginning to envelop the place by  as we, the children who had felt sick from too much candy floss when the fair was at its height, were now in our late teens and early twenties, and for this reason it was a clever choice by Mrs Waddilove as a venue for her party. Georgina, as I have said, was not popular and she might easily have had to endure the humiliation of a sparsely attended gathering had it been held in one of the Park Lane hotels or in the coffee room of her father’s club, when half the guest list might easily have chucked. The casualness of the young, as they abandon their social commitments for something more recent and more enticing, was horrible to adults then. These days parents are inclined to shrug and roll their eyes at their children’s unreliability, but not to take it very seriously. I don’t suggest the phenomenon is new, chucking, dodging, gatecrashing and the rest, but in  nobody saw the funny side. However, on this occasion Battersea Fun Fair appealed and everyone turned up.

I was quite late arriving, as it happens, so the hubbub of chatter was what guided me through the fair and past the stalls, until I came to a temporary white-painted wicket fence, where two officials guarded the entrance and a large card on a blackboard stand announced that the Dodgems were ‘closed for a private party.’ This ensured some glares from would-be customers, which Georgina’s guests affected to ignore, 

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but these disgruntled few did not spoil things. Whatever they may pretend, the privileged classes, then and now, enjoy a bit of envy.

Some of the girls were already in the cars, shrieking and laughing and spilling their wine, as their boyfriends-for-the-night posed and preened, banging and whacking into the cars of others. Nowadays there would be signs requesting that glasses should not be taken on to the track, or there would only have been plastic cups anyway, but I do not recall anyone concerning themselves with such things as slippery surfaces or broken glass. There must have been plenty of both. A marquee with an open side had been erected to accommodate the other guests who were already well away. I looked round for Georgina, hoping to find her at the centre of a grateful crowd, but as usual she was standing alone and silent near the champagne table, so I saw the chance to fetch a drink and simultaneously greet my hostess, killing two birds with one stone.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘This all seems to be satisfactorily rowdy.’

She smiled wanly. ‘Are you going to have a go?’

‘Oh, I think so.’ I smiled gamely. ‘What about you?’ But she did not seem to hear my question, her eyes fixed on the track itself, and I could now make out a car with the distinctive figure of Damian crouched over the controls. His co-pilot appeared, from a distance anyway, to be rather an unlikely one. Her face was almost concealed by a curtain of curls, but I could see how calm she was, and unattached. She did not shout like the others, but merely sat there, like some stately princess forced to endure the indignity of a peasant’s ferry in order to get to the other side.

Georgina turned. ‘What’s your dinner in aid of?’

I was nonplussed. ‘What dinner?’

‘Tonight. Damian said he couldn’t come to the Ritz with us because he’d pledged himself to you.’

I realised at once the significance of this, that poor Georgina had already fulfilled her function in Damian’s life by getting him started and could now be dispensed with. The doomed girl had yielded to his flattery and friendly charm, and opened the door for him into this world, but now, having gained entry, he had no compunction in leaving her to her own devices. So Georgina’s dream of having this new and glamorous companion sitting next to her at the dull, staid dinner that 

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would have been arranged by her mother for a favoured few was to be shattered. As to the fib that had got him out of it, I blush to say I covered for him. In my defence, this was not really by choice but entirely in obedience to natural impulse. When any woman talks of a man’s excuse to another man, he is somehow bound to support the fiction as part of a kind of race loyalty. ‘Robert says you’re having lunch with him next week’ forces any male to respond with something along the lines of ‘I’m looking forward to having a good catch-up,’ even if it’s the first he’s heard of the plan. Often, afterwards, a man may chastise the friend or acquaintance who has brought this about. ‘How dare you put me on a spot like that?’ Even so, it is against male nature to speak the truth. The alternative would be to say, ‘I have never heard of this lunch. Robert must have a mistress.’ But no man can utter these words, even when he is entirely on the side of the woman being lied to. I smiled at Georgina. ‘Well, it’s just a dinner for a few of us. It’s not at all crucial, if you really need him.’

She shook her head. ‘No, no. I don’t want to mess things up. Daddy was annoyed when I asked him, anyway. That’s why I didn’t invite you,’ she added lamely. ‘He thinks we’re too many as it is.’ Too many duds, I thought, and not enough possibilities. But then, Damian would not qualify in this group. Mrs Waddilove was not in the market for an adventurer.

‘Who’s coming?’

‘I wish you were,’ she muttered obediently. ‘But as I say, it’s not a big party.’ I nodded. Having paid lip service to form, she listed half a dozen names. ‘Princess Dagmar. And the Tremayne brothers, I think, but there may be a problem.’ I bet there will be, I thought. ‘Andrew Summersby and his sister.’ She ticked off these people in her head, although the list carried her mother’s fingerprints, not her own. ‘That’s about it.’

I glanced over to where the lumpen, red-faced Viscount Summersby stood glumly nursing his drink. He had apparently abandoned any efforts at conversation with his neighbours. Their state was no doubt the more blessed. Meanwhile, in front of him, his sister, Annabella, was shrieking and shouting as she tore round the track, a pale and lean companion trembling beside her. Her tight cocktail frock, raided from her mother’s post-war wardrobe, seemed to be bursting at the 

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seams as she wrenched the wheel this way and that. Annabella Warren was not a beauty any more than her brother but, of the two and if forced to choose, I preferred her. Neither was an enticing prospect for an evening’s entertainment, but at least she had a bit of go. Georgina, following my gaze, seemed silently to agree. ‘Well, good luck with it,’ I said.

The dodgem cars had stopped and the drivers and passengers were being forced from their vehicles by the waiting crowd of guests surrounding the track, anxious for their turn. They had a distinctive look, those girls of long ago, racing across the metal, bolted floor to squeeze into the dirty and dented cars awaiting them, part s Dior, part s Carnaby Street, acknowledging the modern world but not yet quite capitulating to it. In the forty years that followed, that decade has been hijacked by the voice of the Liberal Tyranny. Theirs is the Woodstock version of the period – ‘if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there,’ run the smug and self-regarding phrases – and they have no conscience in holding up the values of the pop revolution as the whole truth, but they are either deceiving or deceived. What was genuinely unusual about the era for those of us who were around at the time was not a bunch of guitar players smoking dope and wearing embarrassing hats with feathers, and leather singlets lined with sheepskin. What marked it apart from the other periods I have lived through was that, like Janus, it faced both ways.

One part of the culture was indeed about pop and drugs and happenings, and Marianne Faithfull and Mars Bars and free love, but the other, if anything far larger, section of the community was still looking back to the s, back towards a traditional England, where behaviour was laid down according to the practice of, if not many centuries, at least the century immediately before, where everything from clothes to sexual morality was rigidly determined and, if we did not always obey the rules, we knew what they were. It was, after all, less than ten years previously that this code had reigned supreme. The girls who wouldn’t kiss on a first date, the boys who were not dressed without a tie, those mothers who only left the house in hat and gloves, those fathers wearing bowlers on their way to the city. These were all as much a part of the sixties as the side of it so constantly revived by television retrospectives. The difference being that they were customs 

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on the way out, while the new, deconstructed culture was on the way in. It would, of course, prove to be the winner and as with anything it is the winner who writes history.

A great fashion then was for adding false hair, in ringlets and falls, to dramatise a hairstyle. They were intended to look real but only with the reality of a costume in a play, that could be discarded the following day with no loss of face. So a girl might appear on Monday night with curls to her shoulders and at Tuesday lunch with an Eton crop. The idea was really to use hair like a series of hats. In this one disguise, perhaps alone among their habits and unlike the wig wearers of today, there was no intention to deceive. The vogue was further enhanced by the practice of depositing these ‘pieces’ at the hairdresser’s a day or two in advance, where they would be rollered and treated and even sewn with flowers or beads, before the whole elaborate coiffure would be pinned to the owner’s head in the afternoon before a party. The style reached its apogee when the dances began, but even in the early stages, during the first cocktail parties, it seemed a parable of the unreality we were all participating in, as the debs would alter their appearance almost completely, twice or three times a week. Partygoers would see a stranger approach, only to discover, as they drew near, the face of an old friend peeping out. So it was, on this particular evening, that I suddenly recognised the sedate highness in transit, riding in the seat next to Damian, was none other than Serena Gresham, who climbed out of the car, as cool as a cucumber, and walked over to where I was standing.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello. How are you getting on?’

‘I’m shaken to pieces. I feel like a cocktail ready to be poured.’

‘I was going to ask if you wanted another go, with me.’

‘Not likely,’ said Serena. ‘What I do want is another drink.’ She looked around and had secured a new glass of champagne before the offer to help her was even out of my mouth.

Leaving her surrounded by would-be gallants, I wandered over to the Dodgem track, where the cars were already fully occupied. Then I heard my name called and I looked round to see Lucy Dalton waving at me. I walked over. ‘What is it?’ I said.

‘For Christ’s sake get in.’ Lucy patted the battered, leather seat beside her. ‘Philip Rawnsley-Price is coming this way and my bottom will be 

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quite bruised enough without that.’ Behind me I could hear the man shouting for us to clear the track. ‘Get in!’ she hissed. So I did. It wasn’t a complete reprieve. Before we could set off, Philip, ignoring the shouts of the operator, had strolled across between the now moving cars – in those days, you understand, ‘Health and safety,’ as a phrase, had yet to be invented.

‘If you’re avoiding me, you can give up now,’ he said to Lucy with a leer that I assume was supposed to be sexy. ‘We’re destined to be together.’ Before she could think of a suitable wisecrack, there was a harsh and sudden jolt. We had been hit broadside by one of the Tremayne brothers with his cackling companion beside him and, with dislocated backs, we were flung into the tangled maelstrom. Philip laughed and moved lazily back to the edge.

Lucy Dalton will figure at some length in these pages and deserves an introduction, although she was not essentially, I think, a complicated character. Like Serena, she was the recipient, unearned, of most of this world’s blessings but at a (slightly) more modest level, which had divorced her a little less from the ordinary human experience. It is always hard for outsiders to perceive the differences in status and possession within an envied, privileged group, but these distinctions exist, whichever ivory tower one is dealing with. Champion footballers, all richer than Midas, know well who, within their crowd, merits envy and who should be pitied. Film stars can easily distinguish among themselves the careers that are going nowhere and the ones that have years more to run. Of course, to most of the public the very suggestion that this millionaire is less to be envied than that one seems pretentious and isolationist, but the gradations are meaningful to the members of these clubs and, if one is to attempt to understand what makes any world tick, they have a part to play in that. So it was with us. The Season in the s, even if the concept was already embattled, still involved a narrower group than it would do today, if anyone were foolish enough to attempt its revival. Looking back, we were a halfway house between the genuinely exclusive group of the pre-war years and the anything-goes world of the s and after. There were certainly girls included who would not have made the grade in the days of Presentation, but they were still made to feel it and the inner crowd was mostly drawn from the more traditional recruiting grounds. Within 

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this set, then, the different levels of good fortune were clear to see and to appreciate.

Lucy Dalton was the younger daughter of a baronet, Sir Marmaduke Dalton, whose ancestor had received his title in the early nineteenth century, as a reward for pretty routine service to the Crown. The family was still possessed of a substantial estate in Suffolk but the house itself was let in the s and had been a girls’ prep school since the war. I would say the Daltons themselves were fairly happy in the dower house, from which, above the trees, they could just about glimpse the scene of their former splendour, albeit surrounded by prefabricated classrooms and pitches for the playing of lacrosse. In other words, it wasn’t ideal.

As a citizen of the modern world, I am now, in late middle age, fully aware that Lucy’s upbringing was privileged to an extreme degree.

But most humans only compare themselves with people in similar circumstances to their own and I would ask the reader’s tolerance when I say that, given the times, to our gang her origins did not seem so remarkable. Her family, with its minor title, in their pleasant dower house, lived much as we all lived, in our rectories and manors and farmhouses, and the important distinction, or so it seemed to us, was between those who lived normally and those who lived as our people had lived before the war. These survivors were our battle pennants, our emblems of a better day, our acknowledged social leaders. With their footmen and their stately drawing rooms, they seemed in magic contrast to our own lives, with our working fathers and our mothers who had learned to cook . . . a bit. We were the normal ones, they were the rich ones, and it was many years before I questioned this. In my defence, it’s a rare individual who grasps that their own way of life is extravagant or sybaritic. It is always those much richer than oneself who deserve these sobriquets, and I would say that Lucy never thought of herself as much more than reasonably lucky.

At any rate, to me she was a cheerful soul, pretty but not beautiful, funny but not fascinating. We’d met when we found ourselves in the same party for a charity ball the year before and so, when the Season started and we discovered we were both to be part of it, we naturally gravitated towards each other as one is drawn to any friendly, familiar face in a new and faintly challenging environment. To be honest, I 

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believe I might have been rather keen on her if I had been more careful at the start, but as it was I missed my chance if there was one, by allowing us to become friends – almost invariably the antidote to any real thoughts of romance.

‘Who is this fellow you’ve wished on us all?’ she said, steering wildly to avoid another merry prang from Lord Richard.

‘I don’t know that I’ve wished him on anybody.’

‘Oh, but you have. I saw four girls writing down his address before he’d been here twenty minutes. I assume he’s not sponsored by Mr Townend?’

‘Hardly. I took him along to one of Peter’s things last week and I thought for a moment we were going to be thrown out.’

‘Why did you “take him along?” Why have you become his promoter?’

‘I don’t think I knew that I had.’

She looked at me with a rather pitying smile.

Probably it was a half-subconscious desire to bury my lie to Georgina by making it true that prompted me to organise a group for dinner as the party began to thin out, and later that evening about eight of us were climbing down the treacherous basement stairs of Haddy’s, then a popular spot on a corner of the Old Brompton Road, where one could dine after a fashion as well as dance the night away, and all for about thirty shillings a head. We often used to spend whole evenings there, eating, talking, dancing, although it is hard to imagine what the modern equivalent of this sort of place might be, since to manage all three in a single location seems impossible now, given the ferocious, really savage, volume that music is played at today anywhere one might be expected to dance. I suppose it must have begun to get louder in the discotheques after I had ceased to go to them, but I was not aware of the new fashion until perfectly normal people in their forties and fifties adopted it and started to give parties that must rank among the worst in history. Often I hear the notion of the nightclub, where you sat and chatted while the music played, spoken of as belonging to the generation before mine, men and women in evening clothes sitting around the Mirabelle in the s and ’s, dancing to Snake Hips Johnson and his orchestra while they sipped White Ladies, but like so 

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many truisms this is not true. The opportunity to eat, talk and dance was available to us and I enjoyed it.

Haddy’s did not really qualify as a nightclub. It was more for people who couldn’t afford to go to proper nightclubs. These places, Haddy’s, Angelique’s, the Garrison, forgotten names now but full every night then, provided a simple service, but as with all successful innovations they filled a need. The dinner would belong to the recently arrived style of paysanne cooking, but this predictable repast would be combined with the comparatively new invention of dancing, publicly, not to a band but to records, presided over by some sort of disc jockey, a job description then only in its infancy. The wine was rarely more than plonk, certainly when we young ones were paying, but the bonus was that the owners did not expect to sell the table much more than once throughout the evening. Having eaten, we sat drinking and banging on about what preoccupied our adolescent troubled minds into the small hours, night after night, without, as far as I remember, the smallest problem with the management. They cannot really have been businessmen, I’m afraid. No wonder their establishments did not stand the test of time.

That particular evening, for some strange reason, Serena Gresham had joined us among the rest, tagging along when I told her where we were going. I was surprised because usually she would listen politely to the plan, make a little moue of regret with her mouth and wish aloud she could have come. But this time she thought for a moment and said ‘all right. Why not?’ It may not seem a very enthusiastic response, but at the sound of her words songbirds rose in flight in my heart. Lucy was there, trying and failing to escape Philip, her nemesis, who had proposed himself after her car had left. Damian came, of course, and a new girl, whom I had not met before that evening, a ravishing, Hollywood-style blonde with little to say for herself, Joanna Langley. I say I did not know her, but I had heard of her as being very rich, one of the richest girls of the year, if part of the new post-Presentation crop.

Her father had founded a sales catalogue for casual clothing or something similar, and while the money ensured that no one was rude to her face, things were not quite so pleasant behind her back. Personally, I liked her from the start. She was sitting on my left.

‘Are you enjoying it?’ she asked as I sloshed some wine into her glass. 

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I wasn’t sure if she meant the dinner or the Season, but I assumed the latter. ‘I think so. I haven’t done much yet, but it seems a nice crowd.’

‘Are you?’ This came from Damian, further down the table. I could see he was already training his headlamp glare on to Joanna. Like me, he clearly knew who she was.

She was a little startled, but she nodded. ‘So far. What about you?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, I’m not part of it. Ask him.’ He indicated me with a jocular flick of his chin.

‘You’re here, aren’t you?’ I replied rather crisply. ‘What other qualification do you think we have?’ Which was dishonest, but I didn’t worry much, as I knew nothing would dampen his ardour.

‘Don’t let him mislead you.’ Damian had brought his gaze back to Joanna. ‘I’m a perfectly ordinary boy from a perfectly ordinary home.

I thought it would be fun to see it for myself, but I’m not part of this world at all.’ It was carefully measured, like everything he said, and I can understand now what it was intended to achieve. It meant that every girl at that table would at once feel protective of him and none of them, or their friends, would ever be allowed to accuse him of pretending to be something he was not. His apparent modesty would give him permission to take and take, but never to feel any responsibility to a world he had declared he did not belong to and to which he owed nothing. Above all, it washed over their defences. From then on they were not afraid of being used by such a man. How could they be when he said himself he had no ambition? We had not even ordered before he was writing down his address for Joanna and two of the other girls present.

I note I have stated that Damian was ‘of course’ with us. Why was it so understood that he would be? At this early stage of his London career? Perhaps because I had begun to reckon his gifts. I looked down the table to where he sat, with Serena on one side and Lucy on the other, making them both listen and laugh but never overplaying his hand with either, and I understood then that he was one of those rare beings who can fit seamlessly into a new group until, before much time has passed, they seem to be an integral, a founder, member of it. He joked and ribbed, but frowned a little, too. He took them seriously and nodded with concern, like someone who knew them well, but not too 

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well. In all the time I knew him, he never made the classic parvenu mistake of lapsing into over-familiarity. Not long ago I was talking to a man before a shoot. We had got on well at dinner the night before and he, supposing, I imagine, that we were now friends, began to poke me jocularly in the stomach as he joshed me about my weight. He smiled as he said it and looked into my eyes, but what he saw there cannot have encouraged him as I had decided, on that instant, I would never seek his company again. Damian made no such error. His approach was relaxed and easy but never egregious or impertinent. In short, it was carefully thought out and well delivered, and that evening gave me one of my first opportunities to witness the skill with which he would land his quarry.

The dinner was finished, the girls’ uneaten stew had been carried away, the lights had been lowered a few degrees and couples around the room were beginning to take to the floor. Nobody from our group had ventured forth yet, but we were nearly there and, during a slight lull in the conversation, I heard Damian turn to Serena. ‘Do you want to dance?’ he suggested, almost in the tone of a shared joke, a funny secret only fully understood by the two of them. It was beautifully done. They were playing some record we all liked, was it Flowers in the Rain? I forget now. At any rate, after a fractional pause she nodded and they stood. But next came the wonder. As they passed by my end of the table I heard him remark quite casually: ‘I feel such a fool. I know you’re called Serena and I remember where we first met, but I never got your surname. If I leave it much longer it’ll be too late to ask.’ Like a conman or a courtier he waited, just for a second, to see if his ploy would work. Did he breathe more easily when she gave no indication that she knew what he was up to?

Instead, she smiled. ‘Gresham,’ she whispered gently and they stepped on to the floor. I watched this in amazement and is it any wonder? Not only did Damian know her name long before that night, and where her family lived, and almost certainly the acreage. I would guess he could have listed the dates of every Earl of Claremont since the title was created and probably the maiden names of every Countess.

I caught his eye across the room. He knew I had heard the exchange and I knew he knew. But he made no acknowledgement of the fact that I could have shown him up and spoiled his game. This is the kind 

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of high-risk strategy in a career of social mountaineering that must surely almost merit admiration.

Lucy was watching me watching him, a small smile on her lips.

‘What’s so funny?’ I said.

‘I have a feeling that until tonight you thought you were Damian’s patron, when we must both suspect you will be lucky to find yourself his chronicler by the time the Season is done.’ She watched the couple on the floor and grew more serious. ‘If you want to stake your claim in that department, I shouldn’t leave it too long.’

I shook my head. ‘He’s not her type. Nor am I, no doubt. But he isn’t.’

‘You say that because you idolise her and consider him inferior in every way. But these are the views of a lover. She won’t think that herself.’

Now I studied them. The music had become slow and smoochy, and they were swaying from side to side in that stepless dance we all did then. I shook my head again. ‘You’re wrong. He has nothing that she wants.’

‘On the contrary, he has exactly what she wants. She won’t be looking for birth or money. She’s always had plenty of both. I doubt she’s very susceptible to looks. But Damian . . .’ as she spoke, her eyes focused again on the dark head, taller than most of the men dancing near him.

‘He’s got the one quality she lacks. That we all lack, if it comes to that.’

‘Which is?’

‘He belongs to the present century. He will understand the rules of the Game as it will be played in the future, not as it used to be played in the days before the war. That could be very reassuring.’ At this precise moment Philip leant over her with an optimistic offer but Lucy turned him down, nodding at me. ‘He’s already asked me and I’ve said yes.’ She got to her feet and I escorted her obediently to the floor.



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